Happiness Is a Warm Reboot

A nostalgia play that never pulls the football away.

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The Snoopy Show understands that Snoopy isn’t a mere cartoon beagle or the pet of famous perpetual failure Charlie Brown. He is a canine stand-in for the power of the imagination.

The new series on Apple TV+ (a platform that, not coincidentally, now streams many of the old Peanuts specials and movies) consists of six 22-minute episodes, each one a trio of thematically related shorts that follow Snoopy as he imagines himself in increasingly fantastical settings that are out of sync with the banal ones that surround him. More often than not, he’s got Woodstock, his BBFF—that’s “best bird friend forever”—by his side.

In some of the most widely watched Peanuts animated classics, Snoopy’s story has been the B-plot—his battle with the Red Baron is secondary to the main action in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and his entrance in a holiday decorating contest acts as a sidebar to Charlie Brown’s yuletide angst in A Charlie Brown Christmas. But while Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and the rest are certainly featured in